Hope Realized

Is this hope realized?

We floundered in the ocean’s abyss of pain,

Deep in the heart of the hurricane,

Where death was a mystery of fear,

And loneliness was all that we knew.

Now the blue sky appears like an intake of breath,

Like the storm didn’t break us after all.

And oh, my soul, the leaves are still green,

And as the broken branches are cut away, we realize—

This is not loss, it is gain.

The heaviness of sorrow only taught us what is strong,

Where a sufficiency of grace planted and tended through hail and through drought,

Where something small but bright and green grew.

So perhaps this pillaging of soul is hope realized.

Perhaps what we thought we knew as an attack,

Was an answered prayer after all—

Weeds, uprooted from the soul,

Dead branches cut away, lifeless blossoms pruned.

And growth came to destroy the seedling we loved,

To take away the tender shoots,

And to replace them with something stronger—

I thought,

That my garden was dying, Great Gardener.

That my garden was dead.

But a dead tree does not sprout up again in the Spring,

This I know.

A dead tree does not sport blossoms that melt into fruit—

A dead man does not rise again for no reason.

And so, perhaps this is hope realized.

A portion of it, at least. A little piece of answered prayer,

God transform me anew, make me Yours and Yours alone,

May this broken image of You be pieced together,

And renew a right spirit within me.